Meta is building “Prometheus” and “Hyperion”, Elon Musk’s xAI has “Colossus”, and OpenAI is developing “Stargate” — each a more than $100bn project to build the world’s most powerful supercomputer and usher in a new generation of artificial intelligence.
But each of those gargantuan ventures is just a fraction of the spending required to build the data centres needed to power the AI era: one of the biggest movements of capital in modern history.
“The amount of capital required is absolutely immense,” said Rob Horn, global head of infrastructure and asset-based credit at private equity group Blackstone, which manages an $85bn data centre platform.